My friend Lisa wrote a post this morning about coming up with an elevator speech — a short description you can share in the time it takes to move between floors in a lift — to describe her work as an artist and creativity coach.

That’s funny: I’d just read another post that said we shouldn’t use elevator speeches. I found the anti-elevator-speech article while hopscotching from a link in a tweet that was a retweet then following a link on a site… one of those WWILF (“What Was I Looking For?”) episodes.

Okay, I have to admit that my first reaction was…

(My author photo sucks, so I shouldn’t talk.)

Then I read the piece and took the point he was making: We should have genuine conversations with people, because nobody likes giving or hearing a canned litany.

Still, people do ask us creative folk “What do you do?” and it can be difficult to give an answer. Despite the advice to the contrary, I think it does help to find a concise and compelling way to talk about it that saves us trying to convey the entirety of the work or give an experience of it on the spot, which is pretty much impossible to do in those situations.

The question I get the most is “What kind of books do you write?” And the answer 99% of people are expecting is a genre category, because that’s what the corporate marketplace has reduced literature to. The problem is, I don’t write “horror” or “romance” or any other potted type of story.

I’m overhauling my whole approach to self-promotion right now, and in the meantime, to spare myself the agony, and to give people a taste of “Oh, a tiny handmade thing; this is possible?”, I’ve created a little leave-behind catalogue and FAQ for my books:

The big challenge, I find, with most of the advice about marketing and promotion is that it’s aimed at people who sell a product or service. So we’re told: “What do you do? Who does it help, and how?”, or, “What do you sell? How is it useful? In what situation?”

Of course, if your answer is “A dance” or “A novel”, or “A painting”, it’s pretty difficult to quantify the magic of the received experience — particularly when only certain people will perceive and connect with that magic (get lost in your book, be moved by the dance, connect with the painting, &c).

Oscar Wilde said that art must be useless; if it’s bent to a purpose, it’s no longer art. Yet we artists live in a market-driven world and have to justify our place in it. I suppose this stops us from crawling completely into our own navels — though I think anyone who’s worried about being too self-absorbed probably shouldn’t be worrying. In fact, most of us could probably go further and be more daring.

I dunno. I’m still going to advise authors to come up with an elevator speech, because having one helps keep the book focused while we’re writing it, and afterward helps potential readers find a starting place in understanding the book and whether it’s for them.

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I just replied to an e-mail from someone who follows DIY Book, and, I have to say, has really run with the idea. I’m touched, kinda proud, and am impressed with what he’s making. (He’s got a shop on Etsy.)

He asked me about promotion — an issue that’s standing right in the middle of the road in front of me. After a wonderful visit with my folks, I’m trying to gather my energies and figure out what’s next, and that all came out in my reply to him — which I’m sharing here, ’cause the letter finally gave me a chance to articulate this for myself:

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Marketing is my great bugbear. Oh yeah, I can make the stuff available and present it well — I’m happy about those skills. But communicating about it, having conversations in which I close the sale, doing successful promotion on the web — that’s where I suck.

I’m actually in a space, though, where I’m going headlong into this stuff ’cause I want to beat it. No, not “beat”, transform. There’s no enemy out there or anyone holding me back; it’s about 87% just stuff in my head that holds me back. I don’t want to be gross, I don’t want to pretend that my work is for everyone ’cause it’s got some gay in it, and it’s all imaginative and stuff, and they’re not serious. (Just sent a tweet out asking people if they actually care about that.)

So I’ve bought an online course about “non-icky promotion” and another one about writing articles, and I’m really going into this question, trying to figure out what my approach is — and, on a deeper level, figure out exactly what I’m doing in writing fiction and being creative in the first place, what my intention is. (Though I suspect that it’s because it’s in my DNA, my constitution, so it’s not like it’s a choice.)

In the meantime, I created a tiny catalogue with order/contact information that I can leave with people when we have The Conversation (“Oh, what kind of books do you write?”) That way they get a taste of what I do, and I get to dodge the gross sales stuff. (Though I do understand the value of actually putting the question to someone and asking them to buy — closing the sale — because without that they will happily drift off without buying anything in most cases.)

So that’s one idea for the book you’re talking about, creating a small, throwaway promotional thing, ’cause experience has taught me that review copies are a waste of time and energy. Even indie people, friends of friends who said they’d read it and write something, people who know you made it yourself, still don’t ever get around to reading them. Magazines, newspapers, agent — same thing. Total waste. Better to focus on readers.

The other piece of advice, albeit bog-standard advice, would be — if the book has a specific angle to it, something a particular group of people are interested or involved in — to target them online, at meetings about that subject, and so on.

Oh, and a third thing: Readings and in-person events are where I’ve sold the most stuff. There’s something about the force of someone’s presence that gets past the hesitation to buy. On the next step down are situations where people can actually handle the book, and the bottom is online, where they’re trying to make a decision based on a JPEG and some copy.

So that’s what I know now.

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A special interview with indie publisher and Amazon queen Zoe Winters (zoewinters.org)

I’m loving living with my partner. He’s my pal, my fan, and my co-adventurer.

Last night after work, he suggested we go someplace, so we went for a walk to The Whaligoe Steps and The Cairn of Get.

The Whaligoe Steps were 365 steps (now 330 and a few) up from an inlet where fishing boats moored. Women would walk up and down those steps all day long carrying creels (small baskets). Just making the climb once got me winded! (I better start training, ’cause we’ve agreed to walk up and down Ben Nevis later this summer as a neighbourhood fundraiser.)

After we got back up, a nice fella came out from the houses near the car-park, holding a picture of what the steps used to look like. He told us all about the place, chatting without any sense of the time, sharing everything he knew with total generosity — like all people in Caithness seem to do! (You don’t want to try to have any quicky big-city-type transactions here.)

Unfortunately, I had trouble concentrating on what he was saying because the midges were out in abundance. Clouds of the tiny, biting specks hovered around us, and my basic mammalian instinct to wave and dance and try to get away from them made me look like a madman.

From there, we went to The Cairn of Get, an ancient burial site.

This stuff is just lying around here, within ten minutes’ drive of our house!

Here’s the full photo set.

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I just removed the blank hardcover books from the shop on my website. You can blame:

a) My crap photography, combined with my a mediocre phone camera, which made the books look junky. That doesn’t reflect how I feel about them nor how people respond to them in person.

b) The experience is missing. The whole thing about handmade books is touching them, picking them up in your hand, and feeling the gravitational pull of the blank pages. They want your thoughts, your words, your scribbles and doodles! A JPEG does not achieve these things.

c) The pricing is impossible to get right. I make these by hand, and they’re all different. The time and thought that takes can’t be justified in a competitive price, nor do I want to slave to compete with the price of the Indonesian journals Paperchase.

d) It’s not my business. The future I want to build is about writing and sharing more fiction. I love making these books and showing other people how to do that, and I do like how people react to them at book shows, but I think it may be a distraction to have them here.

I dunno. It’s just something I’m trying. If I can get pictures that look better, I may reverse this decision. And maybe as a ‘proof of concept’ about the hardcovers (’cause I do want to encourage people that they can make those, too, if they want), I should make a few limited edition hardbacks of my novels.

Hardcovers are more complicated to make, but there’s also the perception of increased value with them, so at least I can bump up the price some — and have fun making them.

Speaking of signature-bound, imposed book-blocks (we just were, honestly), I’ve been writing back and forth with the amazing Antonio from SintraWorks, who make PDF Clerk Pro, the program I use to do the imposition of my books (rearranging the pages so they’ll print in the right order). I’m helping him test out a new product, and all I’ll say is that this is going to be a really big help for people who want to produce their own books but find imposition programs confusing and cumbersome. The test version is already very helpful — as is Antonio; there is nothing like a developer who communicates and responds — but the final version is sure to be great.

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Wick is the antithesis of Toronto, where anything old (meaning “from the Seventies”) that wasn’t being used got swept away and replaced with a giant glass-and-steel robot. Here, there are derelict buildings about two hundred years old. They just sit; things grow out of them. Yet something’s open right next door. I love that.

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I wrote a little while back about how much I’d enjoyed a book calledThe Now Habit. It helped me with the stress I’d been feeling about getting things done.

One of the strategies I took away from the book was not looking at projects through the lens of “OhmyGod, I havetodothisallrightnow!”, but just approaching work in small increments. “Always be starting,” is the thinking.

I implemented this using something called The Pomodoro Technique: setting a timer and working for 25-minute intervals. Each completed 25-minute dash got me a star, and for a few months I kept track of those stars.

But what then?

Jane McGonigal is a game designer who contends that we achieve much more through play than we do through work, and that fun is the best way to change behaviour. Games, she says, give us all kinds of clear-cut rewards that real life often doesn’t.

As a self-employed person, I sometimes wrestle with getting started and feeling a sense of accomplishment about what it’s all for, because as much as I get done, there’s more to do. Of course, this is great news, having a gig like that, and I’m grateful. And the people I work with are an utter dream; I could not ask for cleverer, more encouraging compatriots. But the work never gets done, and working in my little bubble, I don’t often get chances to celebrate or, as McGonigal would put it, to win.

So I made up this game.

I was inspired by a boardgame idea in Keri Smith‘s Living Out Loud. Her books are wonderful encouragers of creativity and freedom, like an open window on a hot summer night. (He says, remembering when he lived in a place where summer nights were hot.) It took me a while to figure out how my game would operate, but I did it, I’ve been running it for two weeks, and it works!

Here it is:

And here are the rules:

1) Each domain of activity has its own piece. (Like “Books”, “Work”, “Organisation”, “Shorthand”, “Fitness”, “Make Do and Mend”, that sort of thing.)

2) In the daytimer I made, I outline my week.

On a little pad, I set up the things I want to work on for the week and stick that sheet into my daytimer.

For every 25-minute block of activity I do in that domain, I get a star, which I keep track of on a little tag for that day.

3) At the end of the day (or whenever I get around to reviewing my tags), I move my pieces forward by the number of stars I’ve collected.

4) Every ten places, there’s an orange dot. When I pass one of these, I get to flick the spinner.

One of two things will happen on a spin: I draw a card, or I get money to put into “the lottery”.

There are two types of card on the spinner:

Challenge cards. These require me to do something difficult, to set up a short-term “sprint” goal, or to articulate a big goal for that domain.

Reward cards. These cards feature payoffs that I might otherwise forget to give myself — like pampery stuff, or, for instance, today when I finished my work, I got to go for a walk just for the hell of it. (I explored a hundreds-of-years-old cemetery in town I’d been meaning to walk through.)

The card might direct me to make an entry in my Book of Wins — writing down what I’ve achieved instead of just letting it evaporate off into the aether.

Money. If the spinner lands on a money space, that amount gets put into the lottery — kind of like an escrow account.

Every time I pass one of the green jelly-bean-shaped spaces on the board, I get to spin on this spinner:

Depending on how that turns out, the money either carries forward, or I get to take it as a treat. (I have a separate real bank account called “Mojo Money” which is just for gifts, trips, and fun, and this comes from that. So far, I don’t think the amount from the game would ever exceed what I allocate to that account.)

This weekend, I got to buy myself a guilt-free bunch of bookbinding schwag with what I won from last week’s activities.

4) Levelling up. Every hundred spaces, I “level up”. In other words, I acknowledge the progress I’ve made in that domain, make an entry in the Book of Wins, and I can consider myself to be “one better” in doing that thing.

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Okay, this probably seems utterly nuts to anyone who lives outside my head. But it’s working for me… In the kind of way where “working” means “fun”, which is what I’m trying to make this all about.

I had the chance this weekend to make five new books! My intention was just to make a little journal for myself, but I just kept going.

The new guillotine is excellent. I’m still learning how to drive it, but already it’s proving to be just what I need. It would have made lunchmeat of Marie Antoinette!

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I’ve been talking with another indie publisher — someone whose efforts, results, and attitude I admire — about her appearing in an episode of my podcast.

In writing to her just now, I found myself spilling my guts about it all, and this made me realise that the brave face I put on about this stuff in the podcast doesn’t authentically reflect all of how I feel.

Yesterday I unsubscribed in exasperation from yet another indie publishing blog in which yet another person was calling out for gatekeepers to protect their precious work (using criteria for judgment that happens to favour their work) from the atrocious attempts by the leagues of amateurs and hopefuls. I just get so tired of all the babble out there by people, many of whom don’t actually write books themselves, and I have to cut off my exposure to it if I hope to ever create another novel.

Here’s what I wrote to my indie comrade:

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To be honest, I’m at that point when it’s been a long time since I’ve written a book, I’m looking at another one on the horizon, yet I’m equal parts hopeful and doubtful about the point of the whole thing. Not that I’d give up, but it makes me weary sometimes, swimming up Niagara Falls, and all that market-stuff messes with my sense of creative expression (“Be pleasing! Be acceptable! Be mainstream!”).

Some of the work is incredibly fun, and some of it I’m very proud of. Being a writer who’s written several books and learned to do all the production, too, is an incredible, exceptional feat. And on the other hand, it’s a kind of pointless thing to do and the world at large generally doesn’t give a crap about it. So how does one find the energy to start the process again? (Because it’s rewarding in so many ways and stopping is just not an option.)

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Then there’s the issue of time: The idea I have in mind involves doing some research. I’ve got a pile of books here to go through, but when? I work, I have a personal life I didn’t when I wrote the other books, and we’ve been having visitors and will continue to have more. Plus I’ve got the podcast, I’m trying to make books, and this week I’m going to be teaching two bookbinding classes.

Aaaargh!

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Here I am in my new home.